A SECOND LOOK
Howard Barrell
Members of Thabo Mbeki’s Cabinet were in respectable company at Sun City last weekend. I refer not to the editors with whom they spent the better part of two days but, instead, to those with whom they shared a common opinion about the media.
It was apparent at the outset of the meeting that the Cabinet shared the sentiment attributed to Thomas Jefferson, a founding father and later president of the United States that: “an editor might divide his paper into four chapters, heading the first Truths; the second Probabilities; the third Possibilities; and the fourth Lies” with the last by far the longest.
Details of the exchanges that took place remain, by agreement, confidential. But I can say that those Cabinet ministers who spoke in a plenary session on Saturday morning produced long litanies of journalistic error sufficient to produce blushes among the media reptiles basking in the afterglow of their hangovers from the night before.
The errors listed were often mistakes of fact. In some instances there had been failures of what I would call incidental ethical judgement by journalists or editors incidental in the sense that they appeared to have been made innocently in the heat of the newsgathering process.
But in none of the cases listed did I sense or hear any evidence that indicated that callous negligence, malice or conspiracy on the part of journalists lay behind the errors made. Incompetence, inexperience, lack of professional know-how and pressure of work were the more likely explanations. Nonetheless, the hurt some ministers felt indicated that they believed some journalists had been out to be nasty to them and their departments. They were upset just as you or I might be.
That, for me, was the major value of the encounter. As journalists and ministers, we got a much better idea of each other’s human responses to the failures in our relationship. Sincerity is not something I readily associate with, or look for, in politicians or journalists. But, by the end of the two days, some of us were beginning to give each other the benefit of the doubt.
If I am in danger of making out that the meeting resembled an encounter group, I assure you it did not. Nonetheless, what progress was made occurred, I think, more at the level of how things came to be said than in what was said.
No doubt, many battles between media and the government lie ahead. My guess is they will be more fierce than those that have punctuated the past seven years. But there is a chink of a chance I wouldn’t place it any higher that they will be characterised by more mutual respect.
These future battles may even be characterised by a finer appreciation of what we have in common. That is, in the words of another American, the writer Gore Vidal, that “after politics, journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater”.